The EU is building more than a digital identity system for individuals. The EUBW (EU Business Wallet) is the corporate version: a verified wallet for companies that want to operate across the Union without running into slow, outdated checks.
The idea is simple. A business should be able to prove who it is, prove its registrations, and confirm its authorised representatives without weeks of document chasing.
The reality will force major changes across banking, fintech, telecom, logistics, insurance, and public procurement.
In simple terms, the EUBW will give every business a way to prove its identity, registrations, licences, and authorised representatives through a trusted digital wallet instead of sending PDFs around by email.
The concept sounds tidy. The impact on banking, fintech, telecom, logistics, and public procurement will be anything but minor.
The EUBW is meant to hold verified, structured data about a company. Instead of sending full document packs, a business can present single, machine-readable attributes.
Today, these checks are handled through national business registries, email exchanges, and back-office reviews. Each institution builds its own workarounds to deal with inconsistent formats and missing data. The EUBW is intended to standardise this and give counterparties a single, trusted way to verify the same facts.
The European Commission’s work on business wallets estimates that simplification measures could save up to billions of euros in administrative costs and unlock large recurring savings for businesses once these wallets are in use.
Cross-border business in the EU is still harder and more expensive than domestic business. A Commission study estimated that cross-border procedures can be around 50 percent more costly than domestic ones, largely due to repeated document collection, certification, and manual submission to different authorities and intermediaries.
Every time a company expands to a new member state, it has to learn a new set of forms, produce the same documents again, and prove its own legal existence from scratch. Banks and insurers do not have a standard way to trust foreign registry extracts, so they fall back to extra checks and internal policy layers.
The EUBW aims to remove this mess by offering a single, structured way to share verified business data. A bank in France should be able to accept a company credential from Italy without recreating the full due-diligence path. That is the core efficiency promise behind the wallet.
Fraud has followed the gaps in corporate verification. Attackers use forged business extracts, fake director appointments, and manipulated documents to open accounts, request credit, or access trade finance. These attacks are hard to spot when each institution relies on its own manual checks and internal lists.
Regulators have highlighted this as a growing risk across the EU’s financial system. The European Banking Authority and national supervisors keep pointing to weaknesses in how banks and other obliged entities verify corporate customers.
A business wallet based on verified and signed credentials limits the scope for tampering. It does not remove the need for human judgement, but it removes a lot of the guesswork based on unstructured PDFs and email attachments.
The EUBW sits on top of the updated eIDAS 2.0 framework, which already requires member states to provide digital identity wallets to citizens and businesses. New rules are now extending that logic to legal entities, including mandatory acceptance of business wallets by public authorities and harmonised identity layers for organisations.
Once the EUBW framework is finalised, regulators will expect banks, insurers, payment firms, and other regulated entities to consume these credentials. The argument will be simple: if there is a trusted, EU-backed source of business identity data, institutions should be using it instead of relying mainly on ad-hoc local methods.
That means updated onboarding standards, revised internal policies, and fresh scrutiny in audits. Compliance teams will have to explain not only how they verify corporate clients today, but how they plan to integrate the business wallet when it becomes available in their markets.
At a high level, the EUBW follows a simple pattern: issuer, holder, verifier.
When a service wants to verify a business, the company opens its wallet, selects which credentials to share, and sends them through a secure protocol. Instead of shipping a full registry extract, the company can send just “registered at X,” “VAT number Y,” or “these three persons are authorised signatories.”
This matters because most onboarding today forces companies to overshare. A counterparty that only needs proof of signing authority often ends up with full shareholder lists, director home addresses, and other details that do not need to be in another firm’s files.
To make the EUBW usable, organisations will need:
Most current systems were not built for this. Onboarding stacks rely on local registry APIs, scanned documents, and manual workarounds. This will not scale when hundreds of thousands of businesses start using structured, wallet-based credentials.
Technical discussions around the EUBW stress that it will reuse and extend the technical architecture of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, including the toolbox and reference framework created for eIDAS 2.0.
Decentralized Identities solves the basic problem of allowing natural persons to prove and disclose attributes of their identity. However, there exist many more legal entities than just natural persons.
What's inside?
A Technical Solution
Practical use cases for a Business Wallet
The European Business Wallet (EUBW)
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Verified corporate data has high value. If an attacker compromises a business wallet or a weak part of the infrastructure, they could impersonate a company or its officers at scale.
The EU’s cybersecurity agency ENISA has warned that identity systems must avoid single points of failure and weak links in the trust chain. Moving to wallets does not remove this risk. It simply changes where the weak links may appear: device security, wallet providers, integration layers, and national back-end systems all become part of the attack surface.
Strong cryptography, secure key management, and clear incident response processes are essential if the EUBW is going to carry sensitive corporate information safely.
The EUBW assumes that every member state can supply reliable, up-to-date data about its businesses. In reality, national business registries vary widely in quality, uptime, and data structure.
Some countries already run solid digital registries with good APIs. Others still have fragmented systems, limited digital access, or delays in updating important events such as director changes and insolvency proceedings.
For banks and other verifiers, this creates a practical limit on how much they can trust a credential that depends on a weaker registry. Unless member states raise their registry standards, the wallet will reflect those differences rather than erase them.
Corporate users are used to throwing large document packs at a problem. If the wallet interface is not clear, they may continue to overshare by sending more attributes than a verifier actually requested.
That would defeat one of the central goals of the EUBW, which is to align with data minimisation principles and reduce how much sensitive information flows between organisations. Good UX, clear attribute requests, and strict policy controls are needed to prevent “click-to-share everything” behaviour.
The wallet is the visible tip of the system. Behind it sit national registries, sector regulators, tax systems, and other public databases. Many of these were not built for high-volume, real-time interaction. They also differ in how they model data and how quickly they reflect changes in status, ownership, or licensing.
Unless those back-end systems are upgraded and aligned, the EUBW risks being fast at the front but slow or inconsistent behind the scenes. That leads to stalled onboarding flows, contradictory information, and frustration on both sides.
Know Your Business (KYB) processes are slow mainly because they depend on manual checks and fragmented data. Analysts collect extracts from registries, compare them with customer-provided documents, and try to resolve conflicts by email.
With the EUBW, a bank can request a set of attributes and receive them in a single, structured response. That cuts cycle time. A study on digital identity and onboarding estimated that better automation and trusted identity sources can reduce onboarding costs and turnaround times drastically for financial institutions.
Fraud based on fake companies, impersonated signatories, or altered documents becomes harder when verifiers rely on signed credentials coming directly from authoritative sources. It will not eliminate fraud, but it changes the odds.
For high-risk products such as credit lines, trade finance, or high-value payments, having a stronger corporate identity layer reduces the chance that a fraudulent entity can even get through the front door.
Supervisors are unlikely to treat the EUBW as an optional nice-to-have. Once it exists, it will be framed as a baseline tool that serious institutions should use. That means new expectations in AML guidelines, fit-for-purpose tests, and inspections.
Banks and other obliged entities will need to show how they combine traditional risk indicators with wallet-based identity data, and how they manage residual risk where registries or credentials are weaker.
For banks, payment firms, and B2B platforms, the EUBW should make it easier to onboard clients from other EU countries without building separate workflows for each jurisdiction. In theory, that should open the door for more cross-border products and a more unified internal market.
In practice, firms will still need to adjust risk models, operational procedures, and incident response to match the new identity rails. Those that do the work early gain an advantage. Those that wait will have to rush later under regulatory pressure.
This is not a cosmetic integration. It is a rebuild of how institutions treat corporate identity and trust.
For small and medium-sized businesses, the biggest gain is time. They spend a disproportionate amount of effort on repetitive paperwork when expanding to new markets or bidding for public contracts. The Commission’s work on Once-Only and digitalisation shows how these costs stack up when companies must repeat the same steps in different countries.
For large enterprises and supply chains, the wallet can make it easier to prove compliance and licensing across multiple jurisdictions, and to align with partners in industrial data spaces that rely on strong, verifiable legal-entity identity.
“Corporate onboarding breaks down when firms exchange full files instead of verified facts. The business wallet pushes everyone toward a leaner model: share only the attributes that are needed for a given purpose. To make that safe, organisations need a way to verify those attributes together without handing raw data around.
That shift will reshape compliance workflows and the way companies build trust across borders.”
Mark Medum Bundgaard, Chief Product Officer, Partisia
Privacy-preserving data collaboration
Multi-Party Computation explained
The EUBW is a major step toward a consistent legal-entity identity layer in Europe. It raises expectations on how organisations share and verify sensitive business data. The critical question is not just “who are you?” but “how do we prove it together without exposing more than we need?”
Privacy-preserving techniques such as Multi-Party Computation help here. They let institutions verify corporate attributes and run joint checks without sending raw data back and forth. That keeps regulators, compliance teams, and security teams aligned while reducing the risk surface.
Firms that treat the EUBW as a chance to modernise their onboarding and risk systems will be in a stronger position than those that wait and react later under pressure.